Ion Hazzikostas on WoW's Game Design

The other day I found out that WoW Game Director Ion Hazzikostas gave a presentation at Nordic Game less than two weeks ago. Even though I personally don't recall hearing about it before, Nordic Game touts itself as Europe's leading games conference, and handily, its various talks are available on YouTube for free. So I went ahead and watched Ion's.

It's a little less than an hour long but seemed to go by really quickly as I found it very interesting. Mostly he explains just how much WoW's design philosophy has changed since 2020, when retail's subscriber numbers plummeted during Shadowlands and Classic surged with popularity. He talks about how he was originally tasked with preserving "the vision" above all else, with Shadowland's widely lambasted covenant system having been the last gasp of that, and how they've come to appreciate since then that when you maintain a live service game that's this big and this long-lived, the players own it just as much as the devs and it makes no sense to try and force things on the players that they say they don't want. (I wonder how much Holly Longdale had to do with that change of heart.)

He talks about how even if you change absolutely nothing, player attitudes and interests change and you've got to be reckoning with that. He talks about how new systems will always benefit from a sense of novelty, but that even something that is loved at first will get boring and disdained after a while.

Another part related to that which I personally found particularly interesting was that he said that in the past, they were too obsessed with future-proofing everything, at the cost of making things actually fun. The example he gave of this was the Mists of Pandaria talent trees, which could have been built on for several more decades because of just how little they gave you, but that this also made them really boring and uninteresting while levelling (which I heartily agree with).

The contrast to this are the new talent trees added with Dragonflight, which are more similar to the old ones - and are even more complex than the old trees, in my opinion. I did also worry when they decided to add hero talents on top of that for War Within, that it was all getting a bit too complicated again already. His response to this was that they are well aware that it will all get out of hand at some point and will need tearing down again, but that this is a problem for the future, and that they don't want worries about ten years down the line to stop them from doing fun things now.

I think it's clear that he's very passionate about what he does, and I think it's also obvious that he strongly believes in this new strategy - and it has played out positively in the last two expansions so far! Nevertheless, I have to admit I also remained a bit sceptical of the things he said because they sounded a bit too simplistic sometimes. Listening to your players sounds great, but as he admitted himself, sometimes they want diametrically opposed things and you can't keep everyone happy - so how do you decide which way to go? And making things fun now without worrying too much about the future... again, I do get the idea behind it, but as an MMO player I've also seen my fair share of systems that were clearly built with that same attitude, that a certain result needed to be achieved now, and which then continue to be an albatross around everyone's neck because people didn't think enough about how they should continue to fit into the game's framework in years to come.

Either way, I can heartily recommend watching the video for yourself if you have any interest in why the WoW devs have made certain decisions in the past few years, as there's a lot more in there than just the examples I picked out.

(Ever wondered just how fast retail levelling is nowadays? Well, straight from the horse's mouth, it's "literally ten times faster" than it was in Vanilla.) 

Checking in on Cataclysm Classic

Back in October, in a post about why Classic wasn't really vibing with me at the moment, I noted the following: "If they do make a MoP Classic, I have exactly one plan for it: to level a character high enough at the start of the expansion to see the Vale of Eternal Blossoms in its original state." As far as I can tell, MoP was the last expansion in which Blizzard permanently replaced a zone with an updated version, as in the years since, they've opted for the Bronze-Dragonflight-sponsored time travel option instead whenever they made major changes, which allows people to still access the old zone if they want to.

Since I made that post, Mists of Pandaria Classic has not only been announced, but also had a public beta and is currently scheduled to go live in mid to late July. As I hadn't forgotten about that goal of mine, I decided that it was about time to re-download Cataclysm Classic and get a character expansion-ready.

For those of you not keeping track, I last played "progressive" Classic at the end of TBC. I checked in extremely briefly both at the start of Wrath Classic and at the start of Cata, but did not feel drawn to either expansion. This meant that my characters were server-transferred last year as part of the latest round of soft server consolidations, but other than that, my hunter Tiirr (now with two Is and two Rs) was still level 70 and sitting in Shattrath.

I took the portal to Stormwind and started doing some maintenance to get her into a playable state. As an aside, I was surprised by how busy things were in Stormwind (and that's on a server that was flagged as having a medium population). Classic Cata is the currently live version of Classic that I've been hearing the least about in terms of people actually playing it, but clearly it still has its audience. Ironforge.pro has registered slightly fewer than 100k characters raiding in Cata Classic last week, which is about the same number as on the vanilla Classic anniversary servers. So for all the scoffing I've seen about how Cata is where the real Classic ended and surely nobody actually wanted it, there do seem to be plenty of players who've been happy to play it anyway.

Either way, my primary task was to get my bags in order. All my mounts and pets could be added to the new collections interface to no longer take up bag space. Toys were eligible too - the first time around, those didn't became part of collections until Warlords of Draenor, but in progressive Classic that part is already there. Likewise, the transmog interface is the one that was introduced in Legion, and the auction house is the new one that was added in Battle for Azeroth. I swear, this is going to make it harder than ever to remember which features were introduced in which expansion.

Anyway, other bag slots were freed up from selling items that had been turned into vendor trash, such as all my arrows, or things that were simply no longer relevant to a hunter in Cata, such as pet food and mana potions. One bag was filled with a bunch of random keys tied to various BC quests that I wasn't even on... I can only guess that those had been on my keyring when that was removed. Either way, more stuff to destroy. A few items, such a stacks of cloth, I decided to actually list on the AH since there were presumably still some people interested in them.

I had to visit the flight master to unlock flying in Northrend and the revamped old world. (Fortunately the ramp I was jumping off when I realised that I wouldn't be able to fly yet without this wasn't very high.) I stopped by all the profession trainers, as well as - after some initial confusion - my class trainer. (For some reason I'd had it in my head that Cata was also the expansion where they removed the need to train abilities, but no, that actually happened in Mists.) I dragged abilities from my spell book back onto my bar and spent my pet's talent points.

My hunter herself had no spec either, and my first impulse was to go Marksman as usual - but then I read some of the talents and went "eurgh" - right, Cata was when I went Survival, back when that was still a ranged spec, so I opted to revisit that particular setup. Still, I was kind of surprised by how incredibly boring all the talents looked, as I seem to remember quite liking the condensed talent trees during original Cataclysm.

Finally I was ready to pick up the breadcrumb quest to Northrend. It sent me to Borean Tundra when I would've preferred Howling Fjord, but in that moment I genuinely couldn't even remember where to board the right boat for that. So I just hopped onto the next ferry leaving Stormwind to start in the Tundra.

I miss boats being relevant. They are slow but they really force you to immerse yourself in the world for a few minutes in a way that portals don't.

I decided I could be picky with which quests to do, so I only did about a third of the zone (if that) and also made a trip to Dalaran and Howling Fjord to pick up some flight paths. Unsurprisingly I suppose, this was enough to net me two levels in that single play session. The Wrath portion of the levelling curve was presumably nerfed again with the release of Cata, there's another bonus XP event going on right now, and I was fully rested. Still, considering I'm not here for Northrend or the Shattering, I found the levelling speed heartening and it made the prospect of making it through the last two expansions I'd skipped less daunting. I expect that 80-85 might still be a bit of a pain unless they nerf it with the pre-patch or something, but we'll see. I'll probably do Vashj'ir since I haven't done that zone in ages... but first I need to actually make my way through Northrend.

Riding the Winds of Mysterious Fortune

I've noticed that there's a very clear pattern to the way I've come to play retail WoW. It goes something like this:

New content! → Check it out on the main to see what it's all about → Repeat a few times for rewards if applicable → Occasionally do said content on alts for a while → Engage with said content less and less as rewards become less frequent/more RNG-dependent or I just get bored → New content!

The slump before the next new content patch is usually when I'm the most likely to start messing around on random low-level alts. I've got to admit that ever since I got one of each class to 80, I've started to question that gameplay a little bit ("Do I really need another shaman?" etc.) but sometimes it's just fun to revisit old zones and quests or try to learn more about a spec I've never played.

Lately, one of those characters has been the human paladin that was the very first character I ever created. She lives on a German server, so I had little reason to play her once I migrated to playing in English, but after the introduction of warbands made all those alts relevant again in a way, I decided to take her out for a spin. Originally I just did a bit of questing and gathering in her old human starting zone haunts (back in Vanilla I got her to level 20 or so), but eventually I decided that the Cataclysm versions of those zones just weren't doing it for me and that I'd rather take her to the Dragon Isles, since I'd been meaning to replay the Dragonflight story for some time anyway.

(Am I the only one who's feeling somewhat nostalgic for Dragonflight? I think The War Within is good, but I loved the zones and the general vibe in Dragonflight, and War Within just doesn't hit quite the same way for me.)

The other day I logged into her again (she was sitting at level 32) and did a couple of quests when I noticed that I had some "mysterious satchels" in my inventory. It was only then that I remembered that there's a levelling event going on right now, which is something I usually ignore since I think that levelling in retail is plenty fast and I don't necessarily need a boost to it. As such, I hadn't really looked too deeply into the special twist they added this time either: that you occasionally get these satchels as bonus loot from quests and drops, and they contain gear appropriate for your spec and level. The first one I opened contained a two-handed weapon that was a massive upgrade from what I had, and I equipped it with delight.

I then continued questing and was surprised by how much I fell in love with the whole satchel idea. It has long been my main complaint about levelling in retail that normal gear acquisition can't keep up with the speed at which you gain levels, meaning that if you don't wear heirlooms, you'll quickly get weaker and weaker due to scaling until even simple quests start to feel unplayable. These satchels came in so frequently that they finally addressed this problem.

You could tell that it was still a bit of a struggle, as even with the bags constantly showering me with new gear, each new piece would be about 50-100 item levels above the one it just replaced, but it was still a dramatic improvement from how this process normally goes. Some satchels also contained "fun" consumables instead of gear, such as the Night Elf Mohawk grenade making a comeback, which I certainly didn't mind either.

Within two days I blasted through several zones and gained close to 35 levels. I generally find Classic's slower-paced levelling more meaningful, but every now and then I achieve good "flow" in retail as well and this was one of those instances. I was really surprised though by just how well the little goodie bags addressed the usual gearing issue, and while it feels more like a band-aid than a "clean" fix for the scaling problem, I've got to admit I'm kind of hoping that they make these satchels or something similar a permanent part of the game as, at least for me, this would go a long way towards making random alt levelling more enjoyable again.

Dwarf Heritage

It's been a little while since I last wrote about one of the heritage quest chains... mainly because I kind of got caught up in the expansion and its endgame content. Fortunately the heritage quest lines are evergreen content that you can go back to at any time, and the other week while I found myself wanting to pass some time late at night, I decided to do the dwarf heritage quest chain.

Dwarves are one of those races I feel kind of "eh" about - which is to say I neither love nor dislike them - and there would've been others whose heritage I would've been more interested in from a lore point of view, but I don't have all of those races levelled up right now, while I do happen to have two dwarves at 80 so it was easy enough to just grab one of them and get going. I ended up choosing my paladin over my shaman.

The quest has you meeting up with Brann Bronzebeard early on and I've got to admit I winced a little. I don't know when this quest chain was added, but based on the fact that a trogg I killed early on dropped a piece of Tidespray Linen, I can only guess it was Battle for Azeroth. I think at the time going adventuring with Brann must've felt somewhat cooler than it does now, what with him having become everyone's delve companion and a big meme.

The quest also sends you down into Old Ironforge, which was opened up with Cataclysm from what I remember, but I'm pretty sure I can't have gone down there more than once or twice. There isn't actually very much of it, but I still managed to confuse myself during every step of the quest by basically going up when I needed to go down, and down when I needed to go up.

I was also pleasantly surprised to find two (presumably new) Earthen NPCs studying in one of the rooms I visited. If you talk to them they gush about all the exciting things they've learned about things like Ulduar and all the other races created by the Titans. I just thought that was a nice touch to find in a location that is unlikely to even be visited by many people.

The quest chain itself was... solid, though not hugely exciting in my opinion (though part of that might be my not-particularly-dwarf-loving bias coming in). Without spoiling too much, you reforge an old suit of armour from a Bronzebeard ancestor, which seems like a thematically appropriate thing for a dwarf to do, and travel to Thelsamar and Ulduar.

It just feels like there could've been more to it somehow? Even I know that dwarf lore has a lot more going on, what with the different clans and their family dramas. Though I guess we got a bit more insight into that in the War Within levelling campaign at this point.

I would expect players who've done multiple heritage quest chains to rate this one as kind of mid - not bad, but not amazing either. Which you could see as damning with faint praise, but I did enjoy it.

Nightfall Shenanigans

This week we got yet another patch for The War Within, one of those smaller ones this time. From what I'm hearing around the internet, reception of this one has been mixed for reasons that do not affect me in any way, so whatever.

I really like the new Nightfall event though. Yes, I realise at this point the open world events have ceased to be novel: fill a bar, fight a boss etc. - but since I enjoy the format, I'm happy to get more content in a similar vein.

The event isn't synced to Beledar changing from light to dark, but one time it happened just as the event started and it felt very atmospheric.

One thing that intrigued me from what I'd heard about it in advance was that this one had a personal progress bar in addition to the one for the overall event. I can only guess that this was Blizz's response to how in the theatre event, when the bar fills up quickly, a significant number of people just go AFK nowadays.

Yet when I arrived for my first encounter with the Nightfall event, I was immediately confused because not only did I not see a personal progress bar, I saw no indications of what exactly was supposed to be happening at all. I saw people run around and kill things, and the marker on the zone map said that the event was in progress, but I saw no progress indicators, objectives or timers whatsoever. I just ran around for a bit trying to get a few hits on mobs in the crowd, and at some point I suddenly got a prompt to rally for a final attack and kill a boss. I joined in for that as well and got credit for completion, so I was satisfied enough, if a little confused.

The weekly quest for the event rewards you with a token to buy a piece of champion gear of your choice by the way, which I thought was great. You get champion gear from delves as well, so several of my alts have plenty of those pieces by now, but as it goes with RNG, often there's just this one slot for which you're just never getting a drop, so being able to outright buy that one immediately delighted me.

Later in the evening I gave the event another go and was baffled to find the area completely empty. This time the UI seemed to work though, and I saw both an event and a personal progress bar, as well as some personal objectives such as to rescue some prisoners, kill a named mob etc. Unfortunately I quickly realised that it wasn't just quiet - I had somehow ended up in a phase where I was literally the only person doing the event, and my holy paladin was taking a looong time to kill an elite with several million health. I think in the end I only completed three or four objectives before the timer ran out, but at least I got a better view of (how I figured) the event is supposed to work.

Funnily enough, on every subsequent run I've been to since then, I've never been able to get the objectives to pop up again. There's just this huge crowd milling about trying to tag nerubians for 1% personal progress and I go along with it. It's not bad if you're a skinner either since a lot of innocent animals get caught up in the carnage.

Sorry, little guy. A warzone is not a good place to be neutral and carefree.

Even with the huge crowds, overall event progress is weirdly slow, which makes me think that someone is getting the objectives, but if that particular person isn't doing them, everything comes to a halt. Or maybe they are bugging out in some way. My evidence for this is that at one point when I was flying around the edge of the event, I saw an objective pop up to "destory Sureki shadecasters" but it was literally only there for a second or so, and then the whole event UI bugged out and disappeared again.

I tried to find more information on the forums, but there people were mainly complaining that apparently the event had been impossible to complete for the first day or so, nothing about the weird bugginess that I was seeing but that didn't stop people from getting credit.

Yet for all the complaints, it seems quite popular - the one time I was by myself seemed to be a weird anomaly, because every other time I've been there it's been very crowded. When the final boss spawns and everyone converges into a single place, it turns into a proper lag fest, which always amuses me. Lag is just a sign of a proper massively multiplayer experience!

I'll probably keep rotating through various alts for several weeks for both the gear and rep rewards. And hopefully the devs will fix it up at some point so that everyone can actually do those objectives, however they are supposed to work exactly.

Adventures in Old Content

I've often said that I consider the speed and ease with which modern WoW makes new content obsolete one of its biggest flaws. Blizzard have actually gotten a little better with this recently - everything added during Dragonflight for example served at least some purpose throughout the entire expansion, meaning that content didn't become entirely obsolete with every new patch.

Still, as a whole, the world of Azeroth is littered with old expansions that tell stories and contain gameplay that people might still find interesting and enjoyable today, but that newer players in particular are simply unlikely to see unless they specifically seek it out, as everyone just gets pushed into the newest expansion and that's that.

That said, while I'm sure that the majority of players largely ignore old content, it's not completely lacking in appeal even after it stopped offering challenges and gear rewards. Transmog farmers and all kinds of collectors in general tend to find plenty of reasons to go back into old expansions to keep adding to their collections.

I think I mentioned before that I've never been a huge fan of transmog farming myself, however my interest in it increased ever since Blizzard lifted the armour type and class restrictions in the run-up to War Within, meaning that if a priest robe drops for your warrior (for example), you can still add its appearance to your collection now, when previously you wouldn't have been able to.

For the most part, I haven't been super consistent in my efforts on that front, but one thing I've remembered to do almost every week is to clear Molten Core and Blackwing Lair on my warrior. They are old raids that I'm very familiar with after Classic and that make me feel quite nostalgic, plus they contain some absolute bangers in terms of outfits that I wanted to collect. Even after months of running both instances every week, there are a couple of pieces that continue to elude me.

I originally did most of this kind of farming on my priest, but switched to my warrior after the former had one of the Thunderfury bindings drop for her (and these are still soulbound, sadly). It then occurred to me that if I did the farming on my warrior instead, I could actually get myself a Thunderfury in retail. Before that, I honestly hadn't even given it any thought in so far as I'd figured it was probably just one of those things from Vanilla that are no longer available in retail, but that was not the case here.

Before anyone gets the wrong idea - no, this post is not about me actually getting said Thunderfury. I've got the Garr binding, but Baron Geddon has so far refused to cough up his part. (He also still owes me an Arcanist Mantle, supposedly his most common gear drop - not in my experience.) However, while you mindlessly run through MC week after week, one-shotting everything in your path, it's easy to fall down a rabbit hole of related projects.

Because there is of course another legendary that comes from MC: Sulfuras, Hand of Ragnaros. That one requires a blacksmith to craft a Sulfuron Hammer first, but my warrior is in fact also a blacksmith, so it was time to level some classic professions!

Mining went pretty quickly for the most part due to how much Blizzard increased the number of node spawns in Cataclysm, plus of course the ability to fly in the old world - also, I don't know if it's intentional or a bug, but you can mine from the back of your flying mount in old content as well now, not just in the newest expansion, which has come in very handy.

As you get closer to 300, things start to slow down a bit, but I had no problem doing laps around old Silithus for hours. However, at skill level 295 I suddenly noticed that I was no longer getting any skill-ups even from Rich Thorium Veins, and I already knew from my MC runs that Dark Iron didn't give any either. That's not how that used to work in Classic! When did they change this and why? And how the heck are you supposed to get to 300 then?

A bit of research revealed that the only way to get from 295 to 300 in Classic Mining was by smelting Dark Iron Ore, which you can still only learn by doing a quest in BRD, so I did that. And to think I'd actually stopped tapping the Dark Iron Ore nodes during my MC runs since I thought they were worthless nowadays! The things you find out...

Anyway, with all the Thorium I had gathered I was able to skill up Blacksmithing without any major issues, and after Ragnaros actually dropped an Eye of Sulfuras one day, I decided it was time to get onto crafting that Sulfuron Hammer. This still requires you to be exalted with the Thorium Brotherhood, which is not that hard to achieve in retail, fortunately. At first I thought I'd go and actually do the Cata quests in Searing Gorge, since those are supposed to give pretty good rep, but then I realised that I'd actually accumulated so many of the trade-in items from MC trash that it was easier to just go all the way from neutral to exalted using those.

I bought and learned the recipe and looked at the ingredients. 50 Arcanite Bars? Hmm. I knew that transmuting Arcanite had no cooldown in retail, but it turned out that my Jewelcrafter didn't have quite that many Arcane Crystals saved up in her bank. I started prospecting some Thorium, only to realise after a while that you apparently can't get Arcane Crystals from prospecting. Supposedly this was only possible at one point in early Burning Crusade, which might be where I got the idea from. So I did more mining instead.

Once I'd accumulated enough crystals, I sent them alongside a bunch of Thorium bars to the Worgen druid I'd made back in original MoP, who's a herbalist and alchemist and still had to skill up her professions through all the available expansions at the time. Once I started creating the Arcanite Bars, I was delighted to find that she was actually a transmutation master, something I'd long since forgotten but which meant that I got a lot more bars out of my materials than I'd expected. Good job for making that choice, past me.

With the Arcanite sorted, I got ready to craft the Hammer... just to realise that I was in fact still short something, namely some Blood of the Mountain. I hadn't paid particular attention to that item, just chucking it into the guild bank alongside the other miscellaneous old crafting materials that sometimes dropped from MC trash, so I hadn't realised just how rare it was in comparison to everything else and that I still didn't have ten of them even after months of farming.

I was stunned to find that they were several thousand gold a piece even on the auction house, and while I could've just bought them there, it did strike me as kind of expensive and would've been somewhat unsatisfactory to me. Instead I looked up the exact mob they dropped from and made sure in subsequent MC clears to always kill all the Molten Destroyer trash mobs as well. Again, what a surprise to find that such a random item from Vanilla was actually still rare and valuable!

That whole line of discoveries actually reminded me of a little story from my Cataclysm days as well: At the time, my old guild (which was already in decline) had made me an officer, and at some point a guildie I barely knew asked me whether he could have some old crafting mats from the guild bank, including some Blood of the Mountain. I happily agreed and handed it all out for free, thinking it was just a bunch of worthless junk. Needless to say, the GM was not happy with me when he found out, and I felt like a complete idiot once I realised that at least some of the items I had given away were actually still very valuable. In fact, I was so ashamed that I then spent the next few weeks farming MC on my shaman until I could restock the guild bank with all the Blood of the Mountain I had so carelessly given away.

It feels funny to be back to that now, even if it's happening under completely different circumstances. However, at least to me there's also something comforting in knowing that there are still some things in modern WoW that haven't changed that much since Vanilla.

Delving in Season 2

After the rough start I had with delves at The War Within's launch, I slowly warmed up to them over time, and have in fact been really getting into them this season. I completed the seasonal reward track much faster than last time, and also got Brann to the new level cap of 80, after not even hitting the previous companion level cap during Season 1. I'm currently working my way towards the achievement to complete all delves on tier 11 as every role. Tank's all done, dps is mostly there, and healer still has a way to go, but it's only a matter of time.

Blizzard took an (in my opinion) interesting approach to the new season with delves. While they added two new ones, and they are bountiful more often than the old ones, the old delves are still just as valid as a means for gearing up. I still remember when they added the two revamped troll dungeons back in Cataclysm and how burnt out people got on them due to the reward structure encouraging you to run just those two dungeons over and over again. It's nice to see that the devs have learned from some mistakes over the years.

In fact, they put a surprising amount of effort into giving the old delves a seasonal refresh as well, by adding lots of new (mostly goblin-themed) variants to them. I'm still not sure whether I've already seen them all, as Blizz made the strange decision to just add them to the existing "stories" achievements without requiring you to actually tick them off if you already completed the achievement in Season 1. I guess it makes sense to not make achievement hunters lose points (even if temporarily) but as someone who primarily views achievements as a way of keeping track of what I've done and what I haven't, the lack of an actual new achievement to track has been rather unhelpful.

They also made some changes to various delve mechanics, seemingly in an effort to make them less annoying based on player feedback from Season 1, but I've mostly got mixed feelings about those. The addition of the goblin vendor to the underwater delves who sells you underwater breathing for a hefty markup feels like a tacit admission that the "run through air bubbles to keep breathing" mechanic is not very fun and that people just bought underwater breathing potions to simply negate the whole mechanic anyway. It's still much cheaper to bring your own potions than to pay for the goblin's services, but it's helpful if you find yourself running out of consumables due to deaths or simply find yourself at the entrance of the delve realising that you forgot to buy potions entirely.

The way candles and totems were changed from an item you carry with you to a consumable buff that you plop down where you want them to sit feels like an adjustment to the reality that people were always dropping the candle/totem anyway to be able to move freely during combat, but I miss being able to pick it up again for moving, as the new system basically forces you to move in the dark/through poison a lot, which I'm not a fan of.

I also dislike what they've done to the spores in Fungal Folly and Mycomancer Cavern. I actually really liked the way they were a risk vs. reward mechanic in Season 1, where I actually enjoyed aggroing them and dragging them onto enemies to use them as an additional source of damage. Now they are no longer attackable or move, plus their damage to mobs has been dramatically reduced (if they even still do any at all), so they are just a nuisance that means you can't stand still for too long in certain spots.

And the new web mechanics in the Nerubian delves are just more annoying all around, whether it's the little unkillable egg things that you have to keep hitting every so often or else they'll cover the whole floor in webs again, or the respawning flying web spreaders that you can't fully prevent from dropping webs on you at the most inconvenient times.

Of course, the biggest change to delves this season is that Brann was given a tank role. I'm still not entirely clear on why he was only able to support you as dps or healer in Season 1 anyway. I thought it was very telling when I saw someone comment in a discussion about this topic that duh, he can't be a tank because that would completely trivialise the content. This is amusing to me because it does align with my own perception that tanks in modern WoW are way too overpowered. However, I didn't think it was a sufficient explanation because the devs seemed to have similar concerns about healer Brann and worked around those by making it so that he does relatively little direct healing but instead just plops down all these healing potions that the player has to actively pick up.

It's interesting to see WoW wrestling with these sorts of companion issues when I've mainly been playing Star Wars: The Old Republic for the last thirteen years, which has had permanent companions since launch. The SWTOR devs did seemingly also have concerns about companions being overpowered at launch, as healer companions were originally much more limited in what they could do. Specifically they were pretty good at rolling heal-over-time abilities on multiple players at once, but their biggest burst heal put a debuff on the player that prevented that person from receiving another burst heal for fifteen seconds or however long it was, meaning that companion healing was very hobbled compared to that of an actual player. After they threw all of that out the window with the big companion revamp of the 4.0 expansion, healer companions in particular did indeed become very OP, and it's been a long-running complaint that this makes content too easy/prevents new players from learning how to play because their healer comp will just heal them through absolutely everything.

Anyway, I digress - let's return to tank Brann. I tried him out relatively early on and my first impression was mostly positive. It certainly was a lot more fun when doing delves as a healer to actually be able to stand there and heal than to constantly kite and hit self-preservation cooldowns because everything's always aggroed on you no matter what. He did seem to take a lot of damage, way more than a player tank would take under the same circumstances, but I figured that was fine as a way of making the healer work for it in a way that aligned with their play style.

Then Blizz decided to nerf him massively, increasing his damage taken by 60% (among other things) because the spec had "simply proven to be too powerful when players hang back and just focus on healing him" aka when you simply play a healer as intended. This was a massive facepalm moment, though they did roll some of those changes back later on I think.

Either way, I've actually found that tank Brann's biggest issue aren't damage numbers but that his general behaviour can simply be extremely erratic and buggy at times. When he works as designed, you aggro a couple of mobs, he rounds them up around himself, and you spam heals on his rapidly dropping health bar until all enemies are dead.

In reality though, I've found that pretty much in every other delve, there'll be a situation where he rounds up the mobs you pulled but then decides to charge off into the next group of mobs... and the next one... and the next one... until you've aggroed way too many enemies and end up wiping. Playing a priest, I've tried to use Leap of Faith on him on those occasions to pull him back, but he immediately runs off again and there's nothing you can do to stop him. At first I took this in stride and joked about how he was training you up for bag pugs, but it's happened so often now, it really feels like this should be something that should be avoidable. In dps and heal mode, there are safeguards in place so that if/when Brann decides to randomly drop an AoE on a new mob group you didn't even want to pull, they just ignore it unless you engage them in combat yourself. I'm not sure why tank Brann is allowed to pull all over the place and doesn't follow the same model.

In rarer but no less infuriating instances, he'll do the exact opposite and just decide not to do anything at all. Just this morning I did a Tak-Rethan Abyss, and on the last boss, Brann just refused to engage for some reason. He somehow held aggro, but barely took any damage and did absolutely none himself. Do you have any idea how long it takes to kill a tier 11 boss with a lot of movement requirements by yourself as a holy priest?! The fight lasted for about fifteen minutes until my concentration finally failed me, I stepped on a mushroom and got one-shot. I then changed Brann's role to dps and on the next attempt we killed it just fine, but not until after I'd subjected my husband to a lot of ranting about what an absolute maniac and "bearded menace" tank Brann was.

I can only hope that Blizzard will be able to fine-tune his performance over time, or even better, that they'll give us some means of actually controlling him in the future. I presume that there are additional concerns here that this might make him too OP or be abusable in some way, but being unable to stop him from pulling or to make him attack when you're in a fight and he just twiddles his thumbs is way worse in my opinion.